Plans are useless, but planning is priceless

“You can choose what you do; you can’t choose what you LIKE to do.” ~ Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project.

“Plans are useless, but planning is priceless.” ~ Anonymous.

We’ve all had the experience of having something or someone look perfect on paper and not work out in reality. Or look like a disaster on paper and be absolutely fabulous in reality. When we say something looks good on paper, what we’re really pointing to is that is makes sense within the cultural narratives that apply. Good benefits, good alignment with our degree, a good job, a good family. A lot of our lives get left out


of the cultural narrative. Our quirky personalities. Our specific histories. Our actual likes. Our relationships, etc. Trying to force ourselves to like what we don’t like – however much it makes “sense” in some way – is a sure-fire way to making ourselves quietly miserable. There are a lot of things that “make sense” in life that run counter to many people’s actual experience.

The flexibility is to die for – unless you want to work reasonable hours and have things in your life other than work. job in the world – unless it doesn’t work for your particular personality and skills and needs. I’m sure you can think of lots of others.

The problem is a cultural narrative that insists that certain things are universally good – for everyone, or at least all good people. But you know what? People vary. Even within communities like academia, which bring people together around some shared values or goals, people vary. You are allowed to vary. You are allowed to be your own particular, fabulous self. And you don’t need to apologize for that.

I have come across many of them who were caught between their old plans and their current selves and present situations. While executing their plan somewhere along the line, something changed. Maybe they got married. Maybe they had a kid. Maybe they got interested in something else. And now they’re anxious that not following through on the original plan means something bad about them, that they’re lazy or weak or insert-your-favorite-self-insult-here. It reflects the reality that this world is complicated and chaotic and it keeps right on moving, so there’s no possible way that any plan could take into account all the different variables so completely that everything will turn out as you planned. Life happens as it moves on, often changing course.

And yet, it’s still helpful to plan, because planning asks us to articulate our goals and think about how to solve that problem, and that gets us further along the path than picking daisies or waiting to choose diamonds. (Not that I’m against picking daisies or choosing diamonds!)

The age old adage, “Plans are useless, but planning is priceless.” Is quite true in the real sense. You would really hope that things in your early or mid-thirties are different than you expected back when you made your master plans back in your early twenties. The master plan that you created then to chart your course of action, all becomes useless in the present circumstances. You go back to the drawing board of your brain racking up another plan to substitute the former master plan. First of all, that’s another ten-odd years of life informing us that however complicated and messy life is still rich beautiful. We know things now we didn’t then. We understand what’s important to us in a way we might not have then. We’ve probably had a few more hard knocks and challenges to help us put things into proper perspective.

Second of all, the world hasn’t stopped. Stuff has changed around us, and maybe the world doesn’t offer the same opportunities we thought it would but in fact more opportunities abound. We being organic aren’t like computers. We’re organic systems. And organic systems flow and adapt. We respond. In other words, your plans change based on your life’s progress? That’s exactly how it’s supposed to work. Worse, we tend to assume that struggle means that we are wrong, that we’re in the wrong place, doing the wrong thing. The thing that’s wrong is that assumption. Even when we’re desperately sad, or scared that we have no other options, there’s an underlying strength in the ability to see what’s going on, to be considering another course in life.

Any time when we shift a master plan, a point of our own identities, it’s like all hell breaks loose. We vacillate between missing the old identity, being excited by the new identity, and feeling utterly lost and confused and doubting. And underneath it all is only one thought: This is so much harder than I expected it would be. The thing is, all that hard, all that vacillation is entirely normal. It’s exactly what happens to everyone when they change the master plan. The way through is to accept that there’s a difference between the earlier plan you drafted for your life and whatever comes next. We can identify component parts: tasks, funding, hierarchies of power, unspoken assumptions, and the basic norms for our own betterment. And then we can use these brilliant brains of ours to figure them out.

So, if you can, try not to beat yourself up for the reality that plans change. You just have to trust yourself and know that this is all part of the process. Do not get discouraged. Plans always change, because we live complicated, messy, long lives. And isn’t it beautiful when we challenge life to live, our mind bruised, heart pierced and our souls torn to pieces like the legendary gladiators of yore.